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REVIEWER MEETS REVIEWED

SEMINAR SERIES AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM'S ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARY AND RESEARCH CENTRE

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

Thursday 18 January at 2.00 pm

Anthropology Library and Research Centre, British Museum

THIS IS A FREE EVENT

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Prof Charles Stewart, author of Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, and Dr David Shankland, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The book tells a story of spiritual fervour, prophecy, and the ghosts of the distant past coming alive in the present. In the 1830s the inhabitants of Kόronos, on the Greek island of Naxos, began experiencing dreams in which the Virgin Mary instructed them to search for buried Christian icons nearby and build a church to house the ones they found. Miraculously, they dug and found several icons and human remains, and at night the ancient owners of those icons would speak to them in dreams. The inhabitants built the church and in the years since have experienced further waves of dreams and startling prophecies. Today, Kόronos is the site of one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the Mediterranean. In this book Stewart explores dreaming as a mediator of historical change while widening the understanding of historical consciousness and history itself.